1. Technical Field
The invention disclosed broadly relates to automated mail processing and more particularly relates to a method and apparatus for low-cost, flexible sorting of mail pieces, flats and parcels to meet any sort scheme in particular postman delivery walk sequencing. The invention provides greatly improved operational efficiency, while reducing cost and error rate.
2. Background Information
U.S. Pat. No. 5,031,223 entitled "System and Method for Deferred Processing of OCR Scanned Mail" by Walter S. Rosenbaum, et al., assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference, describes the compilation of statistics indicating the volume of mail pieces directed to particular addressees and destination postal regions. The Rosenbaum, et al. patent describes that such statistics may be used to allocate postal resources at particular destination postal regions to accommodate large volume mail directed to particular addressees.
Copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 07/748,983, filed Aug. 22, 1991, by Walter S. Rosenbaum entitled "Data Processing System for Optimized Mail Piece Sorting and Mapping to Carrier Walk Sequence Using Real Time Statistical Data," assigned to the IBM Corporation and incorporated herein by reference. This patent application describes an improved means for optimizing the sorting of mail at a destination postal region and the mapping of the mail down to carrier walk sequence, based upon the anticipated pattern of mail volumes to the recipients in that destination region.
In recent years, the volume and necessity for automatic sortation of the mail has risen in order to be competitive with the other types of services that mail pieces could be delivered, such as facsimile or private courier. With the addition of the possibility of privatization of mail service there is an increasing need for methods of sortation of mail which have a different level of economy of scale. It becomes all the more possible worldwide and particularly in Europe that automation of mail will have to be done from all levels, including from the first outbound sort through the successive levels of inbound sort that include sortation to post office carrier to parts of the carrier's walk and then to the actual sequencing of mail within that walk as well as to the boxes of an apartment house that is part of the carrier's walk. The need to automatically perform this for post offices of varying sizes and carrier walks of varying densities and the possibility that this would be pursued by privatized organizations that have a much smaller domain, requires new methods of automatic sortation of the mail. To date, automatic sortation of the mail, once it has been encoded by an intelligent front end, such as an OCR machine or a code desk, has been by virtue of machines called bar code sorters. These have been available for approximately the last 30 years and are driven by reading the bar code on the mail piece and then putting it on a track which is then deflected into either a bin or a stacker. Such machines are produced by numerous companies worldwide including AEG, NEC, Elsag and National Presort. They all have in common that they are highly electrical mechanical, take up a great deal of floor space and very expensive.